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“The kids were basically voting with the mouse, and they were voting for digital,” Dopierala says. “I realized that this is the medium for their generation. It’s the medium of the future.”

This post started life as the second part of an item intended to explain twitter to novices.  In that piece I  suggested that the first thing to note is that twitter is an information resource.

Different people use twitter in different ways.

‘follow’ people who share your interests or who seem to tweet interesting stuff.

Net Smart is a book for an era where we’ve moved past just creating online identities and communities, but still have to educate ourselves on how to operate in day-to-day life. Rheingold said he believes a better understanding and deeper use of things like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are “essential survival skills” that will last beyond today or the lifespan of those individual companies.

Rheingold sees as important: attention, participation, collaboration, “crap detection,” and network smarts.

we envision a future when students will migrate from the paper books used in previous centuries to tablets and smartphones for interactive, digital learning.”

Technology has changed the way we do everything from grocery shopping, to listening to music, and reading books. It’s time to take action to leverage this potential with more innovative uses of technology in our nation's schools to ensure every student experiences personalized learning with great teaching.

At its core, what’s the point of tech integration? I would argue that it isn’t to teach students how to use a single tool – any tool we teach kids to use now will most likely be obsolete by the time they enter the workforce. But just like we don’t teach students to read every book they’ll ever encounter, we don’t need to teach them to use every tech tool they’ll ever encounter. Rather, we need to teach them the skills – the grammar, the phonics – that will allow them to navigate the tech tools they will eventually use.

Major textbook publishers have been making electronic versions of their products for years, but until recently, there hasn't been any hardware suitable to display them.

Apple also released iBooks Author, a new tool meant to lure publishers into creating new content specifically for the iPad education user.

even if an iPad were to last for five years in the hands of students, the e-books plus the iPad would cost more than the hardback textbooks.

even if Apple doesn’t end up exerting nearly as much power over this market as they have in music, the blend of digital authoring tools, learning organization applications and multimedia books will likely still shape what will happen next.